Yes coming to your wallet soon. The check out fee. All purchases made with a credit card will now be charged a fee. I believe only 10 States
were listed that have not approved this. Just another screw. I wonder if Flying J and Pilot will add additional fees after you are already paying a fee?

When you use a credit card for any purchase the merchant is charged a percentage of the price as a service fee from the various credit card companies (Visa, Master Card, Discover,,,). Part of the cost of doing business that is passed on to the consumer. I believe in the past merchants were not authorized to add the charge to the total in the same manner as say local sales taxes and directly pass the cost to the individual consumer. That has now changed. In effect if you use cash rather than plastic you could get a discount. We have always been paying the fee but it was hidden in the total cost of whatever we purchase but now we, as the consumer, may have the option that if we pay with cash we won't be subsidizing credit card users.

2006 Hurricane 31D aka 'Moby' the Whale
FCC(SW) US Navy Retired 1980-2003
Stella my Navigator
Bogart the All American RV Dog
and
Cocoui waiting for me at the Rainbow Bridge

We have started to see it in Alabama. When I went to pick up our dog from the groomer Monday she has a new sign on the wall. It states if you pay by credit or debit card $1 is added to your bill to cover the cost of processing. I have seen it another store in town also. I am not seeing a discount for paying cash as the price is the same as it has been. Instead they are adding a dollar for plastic.

Often times when I purchase items on-line, I get charged 3% for
using a credit card. I don't like this, but it's usually less than
paying the sales tax on line. It seems it's always "pay me now time"
Brian

I have heard all of this BS for years. Many years ago I designed a facility for Texaco where they could cash checks within their fueling stations. Accepting cash, in large amounts, COSTS money, it does not save money. Someone has to pay for an armored service to pick up that cash and handle getting it into the business account. A gas station, like a Flying J, deals in a lot of money. They do not use some lowly employee to take that cash to the bank. They PAY for a professional armored service to handle it. The thought for Texaco was that they could "recycle" that cash by cashing checks and that would offset the cost that they had to pay to get rid of the cash.
Obviously for a smaller business, where the owner can make the deposit, this is not a problem, but for a busy service station, handling a lot of cash, this costs money, which is one of the reasons why credit cards first started at gas stations.

As a merchant who's taken credit cards for decades, I can tell you that it used to be part of the agreement between the merchant and the bank or CC processor that you couldn't charge CC customers more than cash customers. Somebody sued over that and won, so things are about to change.

Of course, everybody's been paying that fee all along, we just added it into our cost of doing business and factored it into prices. The astute merchants figured what percentage of customers used CCs and pro-rated the cost.

Now, since everybody's gotten so used to using plastic, it probably won't hurt the CC business to add the fee or offer cash a discount.

FWIW, merchants have always paid a fee to the credit and debit card issuers, debit network providers and their own credit card processor that they contract with to provide point of sale equipment or software for e-commerce merchants.

These fees have always been calculated in the cost of goods sold and factored into the retail prices charged by the merchants.

New legislation allows the merchants to surcharge for credit card transactions.

Only those merchants that want to reduce their revenues will actually do this IMHO.